Pale Ale

Pale Ale

The beginning. A classic. Our most popular beer.

Pale Ale began as a home brewer’s dream, grew into an icon, and inspired countless brewers to follow a passion of their own. Its unique piney and grapefruit aromas from the use of whole-cone American hops have fascinated beer drinkers for decades and made this beer a classic, yet it remains new, complex and surprising to thousands of beer drinkers every day. It is—as it always has been—all natural, bottle conditioned and refreshingly bold.

Ingredients

Food Pairing

Brewing is as much art as science, and all beer specifications and raw materials are subject to change at our brewers' creative discretion.

5 Gallon Homebrew Recipe

Crack open a Pale Ale! Mash grains at 155 °F for 60 minutes. Raise mash temperature to 170 °F, hold for 5 minutes, then recirculate. Run off wort and sparge with water hot enought to keep the grain bed around 170 °F. Boil time is 90 minutes. Follow hopping schedule below. Cool wort to 68 °F and pitch with California ale yeast, AKA Chico ale yeast. Open another Pale Ale, and wait until ending gravity is 2.8 °Plato. Bottle or keg. Enjoy!

Grist

Two-row Pale

92%

1.8 °L

Caramel

8%

60 °L

Whole Cone Hops

Cascade

0.5 oz.

90 minutes

Cascade

0.75 oz.

60 minutes

Cascade

2 oz.

30 minutes

Cascade

2 oz.

0 minutes

The Craft Beer Revolution

To those who would not go quietly…the dreamers, the builders, the iconoclasts. Before prohibition, America had more than 1,750 working breweries. By 1980, there were fewer than 100. The beer itself became boring, bland, and banal—eager to offend less, rather than to please more. In the west, there was a revolution afoot, a few solitary restless rebels working for a change. They knew there was more to beer than what they were given and they went their own way. They focused on flavor, character, style, and craft. With names like Maytag, McAuliffe, Grant, Grossman and DeBakker, they built tiny breweries and collectively changed the tastes of millions. They were pioneers, innovators, firebrands, but most of all they were inspirations. Today, there are more than 2,000 breweries in the US with more opening every day. America now makes the greatest number of beers in the most styles anywhere in the world.

The American Style

Worldwide, Americans have something of an outsized reputation. Bold, brash, and brazen. To some, that boldness is perceived as arrogance, but for us it’s just daring spirit and a thirst for adventure. The term “American” in brewing is not necessarily a sign of origin, but rather a brewing ethos and homage to that daring nature we love so much. In the early days of the craft brewing movement, there were far fewer beer styles and what was on record largely comprised the historical ales of the UK and the lagers of Germany. As American brewers began experimenting with homegrown ingredients and their own techniques, they inadvertently created beer so unique it defied conventional categories. Instead of a traditional pale ale, there all of a sudden was American pale ale—a new, rowdy hybrid of the older beer, intense with hop flavor and aroma. American-style beer is shorthand for the kind of brewing we do at Sierra Nevada—a reference to the use of a clean, crisp, and neutral yeast and a healthy dose of hops quite appropriate for the adventurer in us all.

Cascade Hops

Every so often invention provokes revolution. Never was that truer than with the birth of the Cascade hop. Worldwide it was thought that European hops were—and had always been—superior to their New World counterparts. That changed in the late 1960s with the development of the Cascade. Born as the first successful example of the USDA Aroma Hop Program, Cascade proved that world-class hops can be grown in America. Its release in 1971 serendipitously aligned with the fledgling American craft brewing movement. These aspiring brewers were eager for something unique, bold, and distinctly American to use in their boundary-pushing beers. Cascade fit the bill. Its unique pine needle, grapefruit, and floral aromas were like nothing out of Europe and the bold aromas and flavors became the flag for the new American brewing upstarts. If one ingredient can be said to start a movement, it would be the Cascade hop—the plant that built craft beer.